This is the first post of May. The gap in posts is not just down to being on vacation (on vacation from what? some might say) but can also be explained by various dull Internet issues, flaring back pain, yada yada yada. In the past week or so, I have actually used to time that I would have otherwise have squandered grazing the Net by actually reading books. I picked up The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler and Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. The former is disappointing, the latter is impressive.

The crux of Kunstler's argument, as I have outlined in an earlier post, is that civilization as we know it is facing meltdown as oil production peaks and subsequently dwindles within the next few years. Unfortunately, one gets the impression Kunstler's knowledge of the challenges ahead are about as deep as those of the average intelligent person who has read a slew of gloomy articles on "Peak Oil." This suspicion--that you are dealing with a polemical work produced by an impassioned amateur--is only reinforced by the pop-history summaries of previous oil crises, the development of 20th century capitalism, the 1918 Spanish flu, the "Green Revolution" and half-a-dozen other meaty subjects. The author's obviously widely read but he fails to offer the illumination that comes with expertise.

Incidentally, a recent issue of The Economist featured a special supplement on Oil. An article entitled "The bottomless beer mug" undertakes to explain "Why the world is not running out of oil."

Quote: "Peter Odell of Rotterdam's Erasmus University points out that 'since 1971, over 1,500 billion barrels have been added to reserves. Over the same 35-year period, under 800 billion barrels were consumed. One can argue for a world which has been 'running into oil' rather than 'out of it''"

The apocalypse may have to be postponed.

Nevertheless, Kunstler's almost aesthetic horror at what America's auto culture has achieved is somewhat comprehensible. One only has to spend a few days in a very prosperous enclave such as Scottsdale, Arizona (where I'll be until Friday) to become slightly sickened by the levels of fossil fuel consumption on display. (Places like Ireland are doing their best to join the gas-guzzling craze but we've still got a ways to go. For example, the Volkswagen Touareg, which can seem bullying on the narrow suburban roads of Dublin looks almost dainty on the roadscape over here.) It seems as though every second car hurtling along Highway 101 is a Panzer-sized Yukon XL or Lincoln Navigator (note the pioneer ethos evoked by the names of vehicles driven by realtors and restaurant managers). Of course, few drivers are ever prodded into making a connection between America's addiction to imported oil and, say, U.S. foreign policy. Since I've been here there seems to have been more coverage in the news of the incredibly trivial "runaway bride" story than of the unceasing turmoil in Iraq. Indeed, it's very strange that there seems to be more coverage of Iraq in the Irish and British media than in America's (with some notable exceptions, principally The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and The Washington Post. But newspaper circulation here, as elsewhere, seems to be in inexorably decline.) In the heated interior of this huge nation, not just Baghdad, but even Europe seems very far away.

I'll try to discuss Paglia's book in an upcoming post.

Ah, holidays--a time of year to wander around a video store 5,000 miles away from home and realize that Blockbuster, although significantly cheaper than your local video store (whose late fees kick in around 12 seconds after your five-plus euro 24-hour rental is up), has exactly the same range of offerings. (Remember the good old 1980s when, say, ET seemed to arrive in Ireland around 18 months after its American release? We were so grateful when the Hollywood studios got around to remembering us.) As the Arizonan sun has partially incinerated my brain, I can only offer short reviews of the following movies, initially plucked from the shelves more out of desperation than in hope*:

Sideways: Of course it's good. But given the superlatives bestowed upon it, the sneaking thought is "Yeah, enjoyable, some insights, but it isn't the masterpiece you told me it was." There's the issue, raised by others, of whether a superficially charmless and unattractive character such as Miles (Paul Giamatti) could snag a woman such as Maya (Virginia Madsen). But a more profound irritation for me was that Miles acts as though the rejection of his novel means that his life is a complete washout. Yet we see that he actually has a job as an English teacher. Obviously being a teacher means next to nothing for him; perhaps it's the most expedient way of paying the rent on his fleabag apartment and supporting his quasi-alcoholic lifestyle. Now, I know it would be ridiculous to become angry with Miles's treatment of his pupils (as if I'm the parent of one of the glimpsed fictional students!), but it does put into perspective Miles's thwarted ambition. Sure, his adolescent dream remains unfilled (join 99.9% of the rest of humanity) but it's not as though he's going to become literally destitute because of it.

Closer: Awful. It suffers from a cinematic disease that first appeared, I think, in Woody Allen movies. Let's call it "Beautiful People Suffering Tastefully in Exquisitely Decorated Interiors Syndrome." As characters talk about sex and betrayal, you're really thinking "How much did that bloody loft cost? A mil, two?"

I think this picture also explains why Jude Law's career appears to be stalled. There is something about his sculpted face when it's trying to telegraph sorrow that makes you want to smack it.

Elephant: Very strong. Gus Van Sant's mediation on the Columbine high-school massacre displays the influences of several moviemakers. In its ultralong takes that lope after walking characters it shows a style reminiscent of Bela Tarr (Check out the Hungarian's sublime "Werckmeister Harmonies" for a (very) challenging 2+ hours). The high school's long corridors with their reflective sheen also make you think of the buffed floors from Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket". And when the camera revolves around a basement when one of the soon-to-be-killers plays Beethoven on the piano, I even thought of a sequence in Godard's "Weekend" when the camera pans around a farmyard as a pianist inexpertly tackles Mozart. It's a disturbing piece of work that succeeds, I think/hope, in sidestepping an obvious potential pitfall. The Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were interested in becoming famous through their deeds--a picture based on their actions might seem like a realization of their hopes for immortality. But Van Sant's detached portrayal does not depict them as either snickering monsters or bullied victims who snap. They are not interesting in other words. Rather, they are blanks, with personalities as rounded as the pixilated figures who roam the deserts, shooting complaisant figures, of their video games. And the classical music one of the characters plays does not suggest that he possesses a tortured inner self. Rather it serves to underscore a Romantic ideal of sentiment, perhaps lost, that is quite alien to Van Sant's duo, Alex and Eric. So, in response to the real murderers' wishes for eternal notoriety, the filmmaker dismisses them as ciphers, automatons. Not something, I suspect, Harris and Klebold would have wanted. (They probably wouldn't have been too crazy about being depicted as lovers either).

Well, that's my take anyway.

Suspect Zero: This is one of those films that make you suspect that, despite all their chatter about artistry, actors will appear in almost anything if the money is right. How else can you explain, for example, Robert De Niro's appearance in the "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle"? And how else can you fathom "Sir" Ben Kingsley's turn, in a faint echo of his "Sexy Beast" persona, as a [Spoiler Alert] a former FBI agent cursed with precognitive powers who tracks down serial killers by going into a trance. High concept only in the sense the writer and screenwriter must have been on something when creating this slice of po-faced schlock.

*I sometimes worry about the day when I spend longer in the video store looking for something to watch than actually watching what I finally select.

On the seemingly interminable (10+ hours) flight back to Ireland from Arizona, I managed to finish Jean-Philippe Toussaint's slim, amusing, and mercifully short novel, Television (translated by Jordan Stump). Its slight premise--in short, a man decides to stop watching television for good--had a certain appeal after three weeks' exposure to U.S. TV.

(It's not really the programmes that are the problem with watching American TV--for example, I think ER is one of the best things on TV anywhere and I enjoy the slick guilty pleasures offered by the endlessly proliferating CSI franchise and its interchangeable technocrats--it's the oceans of commercials that surround the stuff you actually want to watch that makes the experience so frustrating. What's more, the dippy local news channels try to get their oar in by adding a newsbar at the bottom of the screen during the show. And what merits such an intrusion--a hijacked airliner? Carbombings in Iraq? No, it's usually a goddamn brush fire out in the boondocks. All this means that if you want to watch American TV, it makes much more sense to watch it in Ireland.)

To get back to Toussaint's novel, the (unnamed?) narrator is spending the summer in Berlin on his own while his pregnant wife and son go on vacation in Italy. This separation is partly engineered to allow our milquetoast 'hero' to write a monograph on Titian entitled "The Paintbrush". This title refers to a possibly apocryphal incident, mentioned in a short story by Alfred de Musset, when Emperor Charles V, the most powerful man of that time, visited the artist in his studio. Titian supposedly dropped his brush, which the Emperor bent down to retrieve. Toussaint's academic sees this apparently trivial event as pivotal, symbolic, marking the elevation of the artist from mere artisan for hire to a figure that demands the respect of temporal powers.

The problem, as the hero realizes, is that the real fun in undertaking a project is imagining it in its ideal, completed form as opposed to working on the inchoate, flawed real thing. Partly to shake himself out of his lassitude, he vows to stop wasting his time slumped on the couch--"as if caught up in some sordid intoxication"--in front of the box. But once he stops watching TV, he spends his freed-up time thinking about not watching TV (and not writing*). And his reflections on not watching TV leads him to recognize, during his low-key adventures around the German capital, as if for the first time, the grip television exerts on us all. In one funny, almost poignant scene, he looks at a block of flats in an unfamiliar neighbourhood and sees in the synchronized lights behind windows evidence that the people opposite are watching the same episode of Baywatch that is gurgling away on the set in the room behind him. It's a fleeting image of anomie, offered up without a trace of portentousness.

Toussaint's characters don't get up to much. (In another of his novels, one of them plans to spend the rest of his life in a bathtub.) But as Seinfeld, that advertiser's dream, taught us, a show about nothing can be entertaining. And a novel about nothing, or rather a novel about not doing something, can be pretty diverting as well. In any case, as I said at the top of the post, it's short, coming in at around 150 pages of reasonably large, widely spaced print. And sometimes, 150 pages seems the perfect length for a book, particularly when you're 37,000 feet above Greenland.

Here's Toussaint on the appeal of thinking about, rather than working on, a project, and TV's complicity in all of it:

"[...]Once again, it seemed, I was discovering the truth of the rule, a rule I'd never explicitly formulated to myself, but whose veracity I'd quite often sensed in a vague sort of way, which was that the chances of seeing an idea through to completion are inversely proportional to the time you've spent talking about it beforehand. For the simple reason, it seemed to me, that if you've already extracted all the pleasure from the potential joys of a project before you've begun it, there remain, by the time you get down to it, only the miseries of the act of creation, its burdens, its labors.

[...]Then, following the current of my thoughts, I quite naturally came to ask myself what role television might have played in the fact that people nowadays--entrepreneurs, artists, politicians--seemed to devote more time and energy to discussing their actions than to the actions themselves. Clearly television was not unimplicated in this very general sort of decline; but it then occurred to me that TV could be made still more injurious to artistic creation, for instance by airing programs on which artists would be invited to come and discuss their upcoming projects. Disdaining the works they've completed in order to focus on the ones they plan to create in the future, artists--the most fashionable ones to begin with, but the same principal could easily be expanded to cover all of them--would thus find in television an opportunity to exhaust all their latest project's pleasures in advance, making its actual execution, and in the end artistic creation itself, perfectly unnecessary."

By the way, Toussaint is Belgian, not French, in case you made the same assumption I did. I got this snippet from a site with the slightly desperate title of C'est du belge! (It boosts, touchingly, that it's "Le site le plus complet consacré aux Belges célèbres et aux produits belges.")

*To be precise, not writing about Titian, AKA Tiziano Vecellio. Geddit?

Lenihan should not quit, says Minister states the Irish Times in relation to the moronic "kebabs" remark made by junior minister Conor Lenihan.

Er, yes he should. Lenihan's boss, Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern, claims that 'the remarks had been made "in the heat of the moment."' But even if they were, such a verbal slip reveals a lot about the mindset of the speaker. And it shows that this Minister of State for Overseas Development, who is presumably meant to be concerned with the plight of the underdog and the exploited, lacks the insight or tact the role demands. Aside from that, the moronic nature of the "joke" indicates the guy's not the brightest.

During RTE's report on the matter last night, David Davin-Power (I think it was) said that TDs in the Dáil were discussing Lenihan's "takeaway remark." Those wags! But could you imagine the reaction if some MP in Westminister told someone raising Irish issues to get back to the bog? You can bet that the aspiring Oscar Wildes of the Dáil bar would be falling over themselves to reach a camera to condemn such disgraceful racism.

Just finished Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer, whose subtitle ‘How Climate Changed Civilization’ sums up the book’s premise. Specifically, Fagan describes the coincidence of the rise of human civilization in about the last 15,000 years with a period of unusual warmth and climactic stability in the millennia after the end of the last ice age. This period, in which we are currently living, is known as the Holocene.

As Fagan notes when discussing the record of the Earth’s climate over the past 420,000 years preserved in the remarkable Vostok ice core extracted by the Russians at their Antarctic station:

‘…the Vostok core shows us that the world’s climate has almost always been in a state of change over these 420 millennia. But until the Holocene it has always oscillated. The Holocene climate breaks through these boundaries. In duration, stability, degree of warming, and concentration of greenhouse gases, the warming of the past fifteen millennia exceeds any in the Vostok record. Civilization arose during a remarkably long summer. We still have no idea when, or how, that summer will end.’

It's chastening to realize that humanity may have attained its present state due to a freakish blip in the earth’s eons-long cycle of climate change. And as Fagan evocatively charts the rise and fall of civilizations—in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Egypt, and even Europe—during this “Long Summer,” he again and again demonstrates that as soon as people forget that their standard of living (in fact, their very survival) is dependent on the vagaries of the weather, calamity (usually in the form of extended droughts) is surely not far off.

It is interesting, particularly in his accounts of the civilizations that flourished along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, that when conditions became exceptionally harsh, the ancient cities actually expanded rather than shrank because of refugees fleeing the parched hinterland in search of rations. (And Fagan suggests that those keeping records in the precious granaries were the first bureaucrats.)

For example, to stem the flow, the rulers of the legendary city of Ur built a 180-kilometer long wall, fantastically titled the “Repeller of the Armorites.” This state of “hyperurbanism” was in almost all cases the prelude to final collapse, during which the abandoned the benighted city, leaving it, like the statue of Ozymandias, to be consumed by the drifting sand.

Here's two examples of well-crafted bile from the week worth noting in the blog:

The British MP George Galloway may be a shady ego-manic, but he can hurl a great, almost baroque, insult. From the Gruaniad, which describes an exchange before Galloway proceeded to demolish a Senate committee ostensibly convened to grill the Scot on alleged oil money from Saddam:

"Before the hearing began, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow even had some scorn left over to bestow generously upon the pro-war writer Christopher Hitchens. "You're a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay," Mr Galloway in formed him. "Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink," he added later, ignoring Mr Hitchens's questions and staring intently ahead. "And you're a drink-soaked ..." Eventually Mr Hitchens gave up. "You're a real thug, aren't you?" he hissed, stalking away."

"Drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay?" Brilliant.

The second example comes from Anthony Lane's ferocious onslaught on George Lucas's "Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith" in the New Yorker. He seems to have a real issue with a certain Muppet:

"No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give."

Walter Kirn reviews Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good for You" in the New York Times Sunday Book Review today. Johnson's book is attracting quite a lot of coverage for making the apparently counter-intuitive proposal that watching a lot of television or playing a lot of video games is actually a Good Thing. Apparently, the glazed eyes of the inert couch potato are misleading. Kirn explains:

"Johnson posits a number of mental mechanisms that are toned and strengthened by the labor of figuring out the rules of high-end video games and parsing the story structures of subtle TV shows. Playing physiologist, he asserts that the games address the dopamine system by doling out neurochemical rewards whenever a player advances to a new level or deciphers a new puzzle. These little squirts of feel-good brain juice aggravate a craving for further challenges, until the Baby Einstein at the joystick has worked himself into an ecstasy of problem-solving that, Johnson tells us, will serve him well in later life (though he's vague about exactly how). Johnson calls the relevant intellectual skills ''probing'' and ''telescoping,'' and defines them as the ability to find order in bewildering symbolic territory. Wandering through labyrinths full of monsters keeps a person on his toes, that is, and this is good preparation for modern life -- perhaps because modern life so closely resembles a labyrinth full of monsters."

I actually read an extract from Johnson's book a few weeks ago. It was entertaining but it also came across like a piece of puffed up pseudoscience. He even included charts that compared the simple linear plot of "Starsky and Hutch" with the layered, "chordal" lines of multiple plots representing a typical episode of the Sopranos. (These dubious matrices were deployed to back up Johnson's argument that far from dumbing down, popular culture over the last 30 years or so is actually getting more complex.) But it's questionable whether multiple plotlines or bifurcating storylines actually equals a "greater" art work. If you accepted Johnson's premise, would this mean that the average soap opera is a more challenging piece of work than, say, Waiting for Godot?

Chancellor Schröder's decision to call early elections came in the wake of disastrous election results in North Rhine-Westphalia. Apparently, the electorate gave the Social Democratic Party a kicking because they don't like the government's fairly timid attempts to reform the economy (in particular the so-called Hartz IV reforms, which introduced cuts to unemployment and social security benefits.)

One has to ask, however, what the German voters who want the welfare state left alone hope to achieve by turfing out Schröder's gang? Although the next possible leader of the Federal Republic, Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) is no Margaret Thatcher, her party is supposed to be on the right of the SDP. This would seem to put the CDU in a fairly difficult position of demanding a more dynamic German economy while downplaying any steps that might be required to implement such a transformation.

So, whoever wins this autumn, they will be unlikely to be granted a radical mandate. Whether this means that the German economy continues to underperform is open to questions. But despite the gurus of the Irish business press reveling in the opportunity to lecture Germany on the need to reform, slow growth in Germany has actually been a godsend to the Irish economy. With a sluggish Germany, interest rates for the Euro zone have been kept low for most of this decade, fueling a construction and consumption boom (bubble?) in Ireland. Of course, it's very questionable whether it makes sense to have a level of interest rate geared for, say, East Germany applied to West Dublin. But given that the Irish economy would come to screeching halt (and probably end up in a nasty crash) if rates went up at the same pace as they did in Britain, the last thing we need in Ireland is for the Germans to get their house in order quickly.

I have a bad feeling that this is not a spoof: Das Keyboard (via Blogdex)

My recent (relatively) stellar performance in posting every day came to an end this week as the small matter of work got in the way. As well as trying to maintain a trickle of income coming in from mundane sources (the mortgage's thirst is never slaked), I'm tricking around trying to get a blog tool built. I won't go into details (I'm not sure if I could) and I'm no farther than coding the login screens and messing around with database structure. (This doesn't stop me from cultivating dreams of cunning venture capitalists offering suitcases of cash to invest in my "innovation.")

Don't hold your breath about seeing anything soon. For the sake of cheapness, I'm using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Beta (a sort of stripped-down version of Visual Studio.NET) and a trial version of SQL Server 2000 (for Enterprise Manager). Both free for the time being. The only real cost is the hosting. And time, lots and lots of time. Few activities seem to consume your life as effortlessly as trying to communicate with these sphinx-like electrical devices. Despite diligently ploughing through books such as Charles Petzold's excellent though exhausting Code, I still find the chasm between, say, creating Pivot Tables in Excel and the routing of electrical pulses by semiconductors hard to fathom. (Give me a break, I'm a Humanities graduate!)

Viewing the workings of your PC as an innate mystery is probably not the best stance to take if you want to program the thing. However, in a way, it helps ease the associated frustrations--you're actually surprised when your interventions into this underworld are successful. Nine times out of ten, of course, your computer will blurt out an objection that would put the Sibyl to shame in terms of ambiguity.

Ah well, as the great artists used to say, I must get back to my "Studio."

There's an excellent essay in the New York Times by the esteemed Milton critic and putative model for Morris Zapp in some of David Lodge's novels, Stanley Fish. Fish lays out his idiosyncratic approach to teaching:

"On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make."

By forcing students to examine the syntax and vocabulary of a language they take for granted, Fish intends (I think) to bring them to an understanding of linguistic forms and, importantly, the ways in which they can break down when the speaker doesn't really know what she or he is saying.

Now, Fish's points made me again recognize that really good teachers--assuming Fish practices what he preaches--can, in fact, radically change their students' minds. A truism, sure, but it provides a counterweight to my suspicion (growing with each year's distance from my own university graduation) that most students' experience of university, particularly if they studied a Humanities subject, would hardly be damaged if they were merely given a reading list, upon which they would have to sit exams on at the end of academic year. For me, tutorials, for example, usually were more exercises in embarrassment than enlightenment.

(Mind-expanding talents such as Fish's do not come cheap. According to a page from Slate that I found with Google, in the late nineties Fish was paid $230,000 a year by the University of Illinois. (A typical CEO's lunch expenses, bear in mind). I wonder what he gets in his current role, as his op-ed byline in the paper states, as "dean emeritus."*)

*The high-falutin' phrase "emeritus" reminds me of an anecdote about Rupert Murdoch getting rid of a staff member, whom he informed would become "editor emeritus." The baffled underling asked what "emeritus" meant. Murdoch was supposed to have replied that the "e" meant "ex" and "meritus" meant he deserved it.